Six Feet Under Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Above: Rainn Wilson lets his hair down for The Rocker.

Fans of Rainn Wilson's offbeat, hilarious and strangely endearing performance as Dwight Schrute on NBC's The Office might expect him to transition into film work with straightforward comedy, and The Rocker confirms that suspicion. However, they might not realize the serious professional motives behind his choice. In the movie, directed by Peter Cattaneo (The Full Grown Monty), Wilson plays a grown-up dolt named Fish with a scary fixation on classic rock. Abandoned by the band Vesuvius in his teens -- before they became a commercial phenomenon -- Fish spends the next twenty years working deadbeat jobs and wishing things happened differently. Naturally, he gets a second chance: When the opportunity rolls around to drum for his nephew's high school, Fish goes for it. Ageism and slapstick humor ensue.

While not exactly a classic, The Rocker proves Wilson has the charisma to carry a movie. The script could use some polishing, but Wilson manages to play a completely dysfunctional human being without ever becoming an annoyance. It's a testament to his skill as an actor with calculated timing. The humor emerges from the naturalism of his performances, which make you believe in the outlandish characters he portrays. In a conversation with Cinematical recently, Wilson elaborated on his particular strategies as his career advances, reminisced about his days as a New York theater actor, and shed some light on a few upcoming projects.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Towelhead (click on the image to enlarge), based on the popular book by Alicia Erian and directed by the very awesome Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under). With a superb cast that includes Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette, Maria Bello, Peter Macdissi and Summer Bishil, Towelhead premiered earlier this year at Sundance to a whole lotta praise. Personally, I didn't get a chance to see it and have hated myself ever since. Love the poster too; it has that dysfunctional cookie-cutter look to it -- not far from Ball's prior material.

Kim summed it up nicely when she wrote about the film from Sundance: "It's about the sexual awakening of a young girl, and the situations she gets into as she wrestles with her blossoming sexuality. Very intense, but a very well done film that a lot of women, especially, will relate to from their own teen years -- particularly the conflicting messages young girls get about themselves as sexual beings and learning to express that sexual power in a world where a girl who has sex is a slut, but a boy who does the same is just 'becoming a man.' Very powerful film."

Towelhead arrives in theaters on August 8.

The Write Stuff interview series continues this week with Nancy Oliver. Nancy got her big break writing for one of my all-time favorite television shows -- Six Feet Under. She also wrote the script for the wonderful new film Lars and the Real Girl. The movie is about a young man named Lars (Ryan Gosling), his relationship with a sex doll, and how it affects those around him. Lars is in theaters now.

Cinematical: Take us through how you got your start as a writer.

Nancy Oliver: I have always written, since I was a little girl. I would rather have been a rock star, but that didn't work out. I got serious about it when I was about 21, which was a while ago. I had seen Saturday Night Live, and at the time I was acting in college, but nobody was casting me because I was totally wrong for everything. So seeing SNL, I started thinking I could do that. Alan Ball and I were friends in college so we put on our first show together and it took off from there. We had a theater company for a long time, and wrote and produced all our material.

Cinematical: Was the desire ever to get into another medium or would you have been happy doing that the rest of your life?

NO: I was interested in every kind of writing. I was possessed by theater because I had the means to do it, whereas to get to a camera is a different sort of path. I didn't head specifically for television or film until I had sort of already turned myself into a writer. I wanted to have a certain command of what I did and a certain knowledge of styles, and I just wanted to be able to handle myself technically and in terms of craft before I came to L.A.

Cinematical: And Six Feet Under was your first television gig? How did you get on there?

NO: Yeah, it was my first legit job. I had been writing content for the website for a year, and I had a job reading scripts for Alan. After the first two seasons, they changed up the writing staff, and I came on in the third season. We had worked together for over 20 years, but the job came as a big surprise to me. I didn't expect it and didn't go looking for it. And I was actually going back to Florida at the time, giving up on show business when the Six Feet Under job came through.

Is Alan Ball's new drama Nothing Is Private really the most controversial film of the Toronto International Film Festival? You'll be able to find out when it hits theaters, courtesy of Warner Independent and Netflix's Red Envelope Entertainment, which bought the film for about $1.25 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Based on the novel Towelhead by Alicia Erian, the film reportedly includes graphic depictions of rape, pedophilia, menstruation, and racist dialogue. Fox News' Roger Friedman has already worked himself into a lather about it, calling it "the worst and most offensive movie I've seen in a while" and "the feel-awful movie of 2007." (What, he didn't see Bratz?)

Writer/director Ball (Six Feet Under, American Beauty) cast a young actress named Summer Bishil in the lead, playing an Arab-American girl who suffers all manner of abuse at the hands of her neighbor, her boyfriend, and her father. Aaron Eckhart (Erin Brockovich) plays the neighbor, whose actions toward the girl are despicable indeed.

The film has garnered enthusiastic responses, both positive and negative, and surely the distributors know that controversy often equals cash. Furthermore, it's the first movie to be directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter Ball, and his first screenplay since American Beauty -- so it would have been a hot ticket even without the incendiary subject matter. No word yet on when Warner Independent will release it, but you can bet we (and Roger Friedman) will keep you posted.

After the Oscar-winning success of his first produced screenplay, American Beauty, writer Alan Ball instantly became a hot commodity, 'round Hollywood way. Despite the massive piles of money that were surely used to tempt him, Ball returned to his roots in TV, creating and then writing and directing several episodes of the critically adored Six Feet Under. Now that the series is over, though, Ball is ready to go back to the movies -- and he's directing this time, too.

According to this morning's Variety, Ball's long simmering, still untitled directorial debut has finally secured both financing and a cast, and will go into production in LA next month. The screenplay, also by Ball, was inspired by a novel called Towelhead, and its story revolves around "Jasira, who struggles with identity and sexual issues as the daughter of a Lebanese-American father and an American mother in Texas during the Gulf War." Though the girl will be played by a relative unknown (Summer Bishil) and her father by Six Feet Under vet Peter Macdissi, there are in fact several big names in the cast, including Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette and Maria Bello.

• Christa McAuliffe: Reach For The Stars - Massachusetts native Christa McAuliffe has become quite inseparable from the image of the ghastly tendrils of smoke hanging over the Florida sky after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in January 1986, but she's also remembered as a schoolteacher who never stopped teaching. It is this second image on which first-time filmmakers Renée Sotile and Mary Jo Godges focus, going beyond blindly reverent fluff and digging into the humanity that made the loss of McAuliffe and the subsequent grounding of the Shuttle so much of a tragedy. With a warm, comforting narration by Susan Sarandon and a note-perfect song track by Carly Simon (whose tapes McAuliffe brought aboard Challenger), the film captures the spirit of exploration and discovery through McAuliffe's example, and not by just stating she was a shining star we should all try hard to emulate.
 

Michael Cuesta, who exploded into the consciousness of the movie industry in 2001 with L.I.E. (what The Hollywood Reporter likes to call his "acclaimed pedophile drama") hasn't had a film in distribution since, though his Twelve and Holding was seen at a few festivals last year. Over the past four years, he spent some time directing Six Feet Under, nourishing a dark, morbid streak that appears to have influenced his choice of a follow-up to L.I.E.: Cuesta will direct the horror thriller Shiver for Dimension Films.

Shiver tells the story of "a group of New Year's Eve revelers who get in a car crash and are stranded in a Minnesota snowstorm." So far so good, right? Not so scary - some odd accents, maybe, but nothing even drunk partiers can't handle. Where the horror comes in, however, is when, in their search for shelter, the strandees happen upon the home of "a widowed doctor obsessed with torture as a scientific study." Yikes. And what makes this story even more creepy is that, without any explanation whatsoever, it's described as "inspired by true events." Excuse me now while I run out of the room in terror.